The success of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 and other games Saber Interactive It’s not just a matter of the quality or popularity of the brand: a large part of the profitability of its products comes from the fact that: They are no longer developed in the United Statesdevelopment costs became too high.
he explained Tim Willetts, In a new interview with GamesIndustry.biz, the company’s chief creative officer confirmed that Saber has “Almost zero” development activity in North America.
Saber focuses on Europe and other countries around the world
In fact, although the company is headquartered in Florida and the publishing team is based in the United States, The vast majority of teams are now located in Europe and other parts of the worldbetween Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Argentina and Australia. Strategic choices driven by costs: Developing video games in the United States, especially in cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles, requires Extremely high wages and operating expenseswhich inevitably limits the project.
Willetts gave a concrete example: “I Major studios in North America they have Monthly operating costs exceed $2 million. “SnowRunner” made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, but we spent $6 million on it. This actually took three months to develop in California. ”
He explains that the comparison is cruel: “If it takes a major American studio five years to complete a project, we’re talking about 60 months of expenses, equivalent to only about $120 million in salary. Adding in marketing expenses, we got $150 million, and profit on each sale was $25. It just didn’t add up…. You have to sell a lot of copiesand that’s the problem. ”
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 will use Toxic Commando technology
Dramatically lowering production costs instead allowed Saber to take more risks, focus on more specific niches, and make games that didn’t need to sell 5 million copies to recoup their investment. Willetts pointed out that the development of “Starfighter 2” is based on Budget equivalent to “one-third” of recent North American blockbustersdespite sales “increased by 11 million copies.” According to him, this proves that you don’t need $150 million to generate $1 billion in revenue.
